


Dying is Easy (Forgiving Yourself is Harder)

by sweetNsimple



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Barbary corsairs, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, M/M, Past Slavery, Past Torture, discussion of slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:14:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25731928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetNsimple/pseuds/sweetNsimple
Summary: Nile asks Joe about his and Nicky's relationship and uncovers that the immortal husbands have, in fact, been separated before. It was not of their own free will.The memories are painful for Joe, even centuries later.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 40
Kudos: 646





	Dying is Easy (Forgiving Yourself is Harder)

**Author's Note:**

> I LEARNED HISTORY FOR THE IMMORTAL HUSBANDS. But... not a lot. A little bit. Keep in mind that I am not a history buff, but I wanted to explore Nicky and Joe's relationship. Please let me know if I should add some tags or if I got my history wrong. Thank you for reading.

The near 1,000-year old relic of the Crusades known as Nicky was serenely petting the shell of an ancient giant aldabra tortoise. Watching from the shade of a nearby tree, another Crusades relic was capturing the scene on paper with the reverence of a holy man being shown the face of their deity. Next to that relic sat Nile, flummoxed at the realization that, for as ancient as that tortoise looked, it had been alive for only a second compared to her companions. She herself was barely out of her thirties.

“How old do you think it is?” she asked Joe, the relic next to her.

He hummed in thought, eyes flicking from Nicky to his pencil at intervals. “Pavise will be… a hundred and fifty-two in May, I believe. I may be off by a few years. You would have to ask Nicky.”

She stared at him. “His name is Pavise?”

“Her name is Pavise, yes. I have a picture somewhere, framed, of the day she hatched in Nicky’s hands. It has the date she was born, I can almost see it now…”

“Wait, wait, wait… is that… is that _Nicky’s_ turtle?”

Joe bobbed his head from side to side as he considered. “As much as Pavise can belong to anyone, I suppose. Nicky raised her for a few years and then we had to leave. Every so often, we come back to visit her. I know Nicky is afraid that she will forget him or be gone, but, she is a loyal woman and is always here when he comes for her. Nicky has memorized every scar on her carapace, every dip of her plastron, so that he can always pick her out from a group.” He was fond as he spoke of the two like Nicky kept coming back to see a lover instead of one of the world’s largest tortoise species. His love for the other man made his dark eyes shine and every bit of his affection showed as pencil touched paper with delicate and dedicated precision.

Nile watched tortoise and man congregate in silent companionship. Nicky was giving Pavise a neck massage and she was stretching her head to lay on his shoulder to compensate.

Questions clamored in her head that had been bugging her off and on for the past year she had travelled with the immortal lovers. Andy had gotten a call from Booker a few months back and had disappeared from the group with a look of someone who had seen a ghost. Joe and Nicky were only slightly concerned and that was only after Nile ranted at them about Andy’s mortal status. A call to Andy had confirmed that she was still alive but needed some time alone to… fix something. Joe and Nicky, loyal to Andy, conceded to her wishes and booked a flight to the archipelagic island country of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. They insisted that Nile join them.

In the near six months of being alone with them, she was constantly exposed to the deep wells of their feelings for one another, almost drowning herself in their intimacy. They acted like they had been together so long that they need not bother with words – which Nile knew to be true for the immortal gang in general – and at other times like they had just met and that first contact of eyes had left them without defense. And yet…. They had been together since the _first_ Crusades. She had double checked her history and, yeah, that had started in 1095. 1099 was when Jerusalem fell to the Christian Church. They had been together for getting close to a _thousand_ years now!

Nile had tried to imagine loving someone that much. She tried to imagine someone who looked at her the way Joe looked at Nicky after living more than ten lifetimes with them and she… she just couldn’t. There was so much of their relationship that she wondered about. Did they ever separate? Did they ever argue? Did they ever take other lovers? How could the sex _still_ be good after all this time with the same guy? Nile had always liked the idea of a soulmate but had convinced herself that having one love for the entirety of her mortal life would likely not happen. Now that she was immortal? She just… didn’t get it.

Her curiosity must have finally caught on fire. Joe sniffed the air like he smelled smoke and gave her an inquiring look. “You look like you are thinking too hard.”

“I haven’t really stopped thinking since this all happened.”

“It will take some time to quiet your thoughts. This is a lot to accept, as Nicky has said. It still has not been that long for you.”

At least Joe and Nicky were supportive.

“Would it be okay if I asked you a few questions? About you and Nicky?”

Joe considered this. “You can ask and I will try to answer.”

“How are you two… still together? I mean, being immortal, I’d understand if you two were still friends or… friends with benefits… or off-and-on lovers, I guess… But you two are just so dedicated to each other. Protective, loyal, _intimate_. You don’t act like two people who have had a thousand years to get used to each other, is what I mean. You act like he’s everything he does is a miracle.”

Joe chuckled. “Yes, every shit he takes fills me with rapture.”

She snorted. “You _know_ that’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” he agreed easily. “I have gotten used to him. I know his thoughts as if he has spoken them aloud to me, I know his fears like my own. I can map the veins on the back of his hand without looking, and I have successfully blended my own paints to the exact pigment of his eyes when he is not even there. I know his favorite food, his preferred bedroom and outdoor temperatures, his favorite drink, the brand of shoe he currently likes best. You may see that as boring, to know someone so completely and have no surprises left – however, after living so long, it is… a comfort. The world keeps changing. Someone invented electric stoves and then microwaves and we had to adapt. My first encounter with a washing machine took one of my legs.”

“ _What_? How?”

“It was a Thor Washer, 1921 or so.”

“That does not explain how you lost your leg.”

Joe shrugged, unconcerned. “If not for Nicky, the experience would have killed me. I knew nothing of electric washing machines. Luckily, Nicky knew me.”

She nodded, starting to get an idea of where this was going. “It’s nice to have something that doesn’t change over time.”

Joe hummed in a way that said he disagreed but was finding the words to explain himself. “It is not that we have not changed. We have to. If Nicky walked around now like he did back in the Crusades, we would have no peace. It is more like… We know each other so well that we know how the other will react to change. I admit, the first time I saw a woman propose to a man, it was only Nicky’s quick thinking that stopped me from running my mouth and facing Andy’s wrath.”

That gave her pause. “It’s weird, but I never thought of you guys having outdated beliefs like that… then again, for you, they wouldn’t be outdated.”

“They are if you do not outrgrow them,” Joe informed her.

She got an uncomfortable feeling in her gut. “Did you… ever keep slaves?”

Joe went rigid for a moment before forcing himself to relax with obvious effort. “I can say honestly that we never kept slaves.” There was something in his voice that grabbed Nile’s attention.

“Something happened with slaves, though,” she guessed. She wondered if Joe and Nicky, in their long lives, had ever looked at one of her ancestors and seen something less than human. The thought made her curl her hands into fists in her lap.

A large, warm hand covered both of hers, giving them a comforting squeeze. “Yes,” Joe whispered. “Something happened.” He sucked in a deep breath and shut his sketch book. Nicky had stretched out across the grass so that Pavise was able to lower her considerable heft over his belly and enjoy his body heat.

“It was the 1600’s,” he began softly. “We were resting in a coastal village in Spain. We were not yet aware of the Barbary corsairs, pirates that would capture people and sell them in the Barbary coast cities. We should have been. We were in their preferred hunting ground.” His eyes looked far into the past and at Nicky simultaneously. “We have not always slept with his back to my chest. That night…” his lips twitched in a lackluster smile. “ _I_ was the little spoon.” The smile died and all humor with it. “For all my years of living, I am not quick to react when waking up.”

“I’ve noticed that,” she admitted. Whenever anything startled their group awake – nightmares, cats fighting outside, shooting, _anything_ – Nicky reached for a weapon before his eyes were fully open and Joe reached for Nicky.

Joe’s jaw clenched. “I was not fast enough. There were two, only two. It shouldn’t have been a problem. I reached for my scimitar a moment too late, maybe a moment too soon, I still am not sure. Either way, I was not fast enough to arm myself – only fast enough to look like a threat. Instead of taking me alive, they cut my head from my body in the panic. Nicky’s longsword had been next to my scimitar, he couldn’t reach it over my dead body. From what he has told me, the sight of me headless was so upsetting to him that he killed five pirates before he was finally caught and chained. We still wonder why they decided to kill me and take him alive. He was taken by ship to what is now Libya and sold into slavery. He spent two years forced to work in a quarry. For two more years after that, he was chained to a galley and forced to man the oars. Galley slaves never left their stations. When he continued to try and escape, an emir took notice of him and forced Nicky to fight other slaves for his amusement.”

Joe took his hands back and looked brokenly at his palms. “In all, it took me five years to find him,” he whispered. “By the time I did, he was more beast than man.”

~::~

Yusuf had heard of the white man that was exceptionally difficult to kill and that fought like a nightmarish monster. His blue eyes, Yusuf had heard, were like chips of ice. Like blue fire. This white slave belonged to an emir and his teeth were always red with someone else’s blood.

Yusuf felt that his search was finally over – he had found Nicolo, his everything and more. And yet, he was afraid of what he heard. He was afraid of what he would find of Nicolo. He was afraid to find what Nicolo had become.

He managed by luck and by deception to sneak into the emir’s bagnio and, for how hot and overcrowded it was, it took only seconds to spot his lost lover. All the other slaves acted as if their cages protected them from the monster that was not only locked in his own cage but chained to its walls.

‘My love,’ Yusuf whispered, horrified. Nicolo had become gaunt, his head shaved completely. With no bruise or scratch in sight, he still managed to look like a beaten dog, if only because he snapped and snarled at Yusuf in the same way a beaten dog would. ‘Nicolo,’ Yusuf sobbed. ‘Stop, please, it is me. It is Yusuf, _your_ Yusuf.’ He drew closer.

Nicolo stopped snarling at him, if only to look uncertain. His throat clicked more than once before he croaked, ‘My… Yusuf?’ He spoke with the voice of someone who had forgotten how to speak.

‘Yes,’ he choked. ‘Yours. Won’t you come with me, Nicolo?’

Nicolo pulled pointedly at his chains. A sword would not cut those off.

‘I will free you,’ Yusuf swore. Unable to stop himself, he swept in close to the other man and pressed desperate kisses to his face through the bars. Nicolo smelled awful, as if he was rotting. When Yusuf finally kissed the man’s lips, the rust and stench of old blood was near overwhelming. Yusuf barely cared. He wrapped his arms through the bars and around Nicolo’s waist as Nicolo pushed closer, his own chest digging painfully into the cage.

Without warning, Nicolo turned his head and bit deep into the meat of Yusuf’s shoulder. The cry that left Yusuf was less pain and more bliss.

‘Hurry, my love,’ Nicolo rasped against the shell of Yusuf’s ear. ‘Do not leave me here.’

It took hours to find a guard with the keys to Nicolo’s chains. Hours in which Yusuf felt like screaming his frustration, tears imminent. He wished he had Andromache and Quynh to help him, but he had not dared waste time finding them first before chasing after the pirates. Already, it had taken him five years. He could not bear to think of what would have happened if he had entirely lost Nicolo’s trail.

When he returned to Nicolo’s side, he found his other half sitting on the filthy ground, his eyes shut like he was deep in meditation. His eyes opened slowly as Yusuf approached, both familiar and terribly new. There was an animal in his gaze, not like the heat that used to make Yusuf feel lusty. This animal watched Yusuf with a hunger that was not sexual so much as violent. Would Nicolo tear Yusuf apart for his blunder five years ago? Yusuf would deserve it.

He unchained the beast and all the slaves in the bagnio pressed to the walls of their own cells. Nicolo, without a word, took the keys from Yusuf and began unlocking each cage. Yusuf kept one hand on the hilt of his scimitar as he guarded Nicolo’s back, his every sense on high alert.

When finally they left, half of the enslaved men followed.

~::~

Joe stroked his hand over the cover of his sketch book.

Nile closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath before opening them. “So now Nicky’s the little spoon?”

It had the intended effect of making Joe laugh. “Yes,” he agreed. “This is the story of why Nicky is the little spoon. Nothing else.”

~::~

That was partially a lie. This was also the story of why Nicky had adapted as a sniper. This was also the story of why that animal glint came back to Nicky’s eyes whenever Joe got hurt. This was also the story of why they always travelled together and never apart.

It was some time before Nicky said goodbye to Pavice and they managed to return to their cottage. Nile, silent as she digested what she had learned and busy on her phone to gain more background information, disappeared into her small room.

Joe went to the kitchen to begin dinner. He picked up a fillet knife, paused, and then carefully set it back down. He swiped a hand futilely over his face but the tears were stubborn.

Nicky had been a slave for five years because Joe panicked. It had been almost four hundred years and he still remembered coming back from the dead that one time without Nicky. He had been wild with grief and desperate to be whole with Nicky once more. Reuniting with Nicky, he had failed altogether to sleep. He kept constant vigilance over his recovering lover and his health had deteriorated to where he regularly spoke with his hallucinations and had achieved more than once sleeping while standing up and with his eyes open.

It had taken a very long time for Joe to trust sleep again.

Arms circled his chest and Nicky pressed a kiss to the angle of his jaw. “You told Nile.” It was not a question. “No more apologies.”

The apology was there on the tip of his tongue anyway. Joe swallowed it back. There was, in essence, no point in talking about that tragedy in their past. They had spoken of it over and over again, admitting to every deed and thought taken apart, every guilt and sorrow and burst of anger. Nicky had said, more than once, that he knew Joe would come for him someday, that Joe would not leave him in that place. Joe admitted to how horrible he felt that his panic had led to Nicky’s capture. Nicky had been lonely without him, had wished to have him by his side for every agony, but, he had countered, he was glad that Joe had not had to suffer. He did not regret that Joe evaded capture by dying.

The conversations on this matter had been numerous and lengthy. Joe stood there in silence and Nicky held him as he did so and that was a conversation in comfort by itself.

Nicky pressed a kiss to the nape of his neck. _I love you_ went unspoken and was felt profoundly in the center of Joe’s being.

“Go sit,” Nicky ordered. He took up the fillet knife as Joe obeyed.

Joe watched, hungry for a thousand and more moments like these, domestic and calm. “I would do anything for you,” he breathed, always the one to speak his heart while Nicky chose acts of love to speak for him.

“Forgive yourself.”

Joe curled a hands together on top of the table. “If I could…”

“You will.”

There was no uncertainty in Nicky’s voice. “I will,” Joe agreed, because he could never really say no to Nicky, even if he had been saying he would forgive himself for centuries. Someday, he thought. Someday, he would.

He would do anything for Nicky. Even forgive himself.


End file.
